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Mummies dating to c. 1000 B.C. were unearthed in Britain and were recognized as having skeletal remains of different people. The mystery may have been solved with the help of DNA analysis.
The researchers now believe that large extended families, living under one roof, may have shared their homes with the mummified remains of their dead ancestors, before deliberately putting the bodies together to look like single corpses – possibly in an attempt to demonstrate the uniting of different families.Professor Mike Parker Pearson, an archaeologist at University College London who led the research, said: “It looks like these individuals had been cut up and put back together to look like one person.”
Note that Mike Parker Pearson is the same archaeologist who appeared in the NOVA video on Stonehenge.
This story is a good example of archaeological guesswork. They are just guessing because they don't know the real reason and absent the invention of time travel, never will. This kind of garbage is one of the reasons I am occasionally down on archaeology.
Guesswork? Where are you getting that from? You make it sound like they're grasping for straws. I just reread the article, and it is all factual except for a few small areas of hypothesizing – something which people in any historical field are allowed to do by following the evidence. Here are the areas of hypothesis:
He said the mixing of the body parts could have been due to “misfortune or carelessness”, but added: “The merging of their identities may have been a deliberate act, perhaps designed to amalgamate different ancestries into a single lineage.”
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The building where the two mummified skeletons were found may have even become a “house of the dead” with priest-like people living there, professor Pearson believes.He added: “Having six preserved body parts to hand indicates there was sufficient space in which to store them for some time prior to their reassembly.“This raises the possibility that these dead either shared accommodation with the living or were kept in separate, as yet unidentified, 'mummy houses’ which were warm and dry enough to inhibit soft tissue decay.”
If this is "guesswork", then you would probably need to implicate the field of academic history in this as well. It's clearly labeled where he is separating fact from possibilities, which presumably will lead him in future work.
“perhaps designed to amalgamate different ancestries into a single lineage.”, “Having six preserved body parts to hand indicates there was sufficient space in which to store them for some time prior to their reassembly.”Two examples of pure guesswork, plausible guesswork maybe but guesses nonetheless
The first of what you provide is not even stated as a hypothesis, but is raised as a possibility. It is clearly labeled as such. Perhaps it is a working hypothesis which will later be tested. The second is more of a conclusion of an archaeologist who presumably has sufficient experience to make such a conclusion. Are you seriously telling me that you never raise possibilities in your research when there is something important which is not provided by the historical record? Do you simply leave your conclusion blank if there is something which cannot be factually determined? Perhaps you do, but I think it is entirely acceptable for other historians to start out with an idea, formulate a hypothesis, and then try to verify it. That's what arguing is for in a work of historical scholarship. I don't think that archaeology is any different from the field of history in this regard, and I hardly think the article above shows an example of academic "garbage". It's also important to keep in mind that we're reading a newspaper article, rather than a journal article; we are therefore only getting tidbits of information without all the factual support usually provided in an academic piece of writing.So I respectfully disagree that this article is proof of archaeological "guesswork", or even that that is something common to the field of archaeology. Just as there are good and bad examples of academic history, there are examples of good and bad archaeology. Yet both are by and large incredibly helpful.
How are you going test those hypotheses? Without a time machine or written records the reason for the frankenmummies is and will remain pure speculation. That is all I am saying. Heck, it could even be that the frankenmummies are the parts of the bodies they found less tasty, we just don't know.
I don't think a time machine is needed to confirm the truth of a hypothesis. I think that circumstantial evidence can create a picture which is very compelling in situations where there is no written record. That is, after all, sometimes the only thing we are left with.An example - suppose a cave were to be found with paintings of large animals on the inside. Suppose that testing of the pigments determined that the paintings date to 10,000 B.C. Suppose also that artificial chipping is found on the wall which correspond with parts of the animals near their vital organs. Suppose that spear heads are also uncovered near those paintings which also date to the same period, and these spear heads correspond to the general shape or size of the chippings on the wall. We obviously have no written records to account for why these paintings were made, but that, of course, is the question. I think it's entirely reasonable to use circumstantial evidence to support a theory about why they were made or what they were used for. This theory may have to be revised as new evidence is uncovered in the future. I think it's necessary to label it as a theory, but it helps us better picture the historical context of the cave. This picture can then lead us to new findings down the road - if this cave were used for X, then perhaps we should start looking for Y and Z in this cave as well.So for me, even if we don't know something with 100% certainty, we can still follow evidence which points to greater or lesser probabilities.
